‘How cool is this?’: Butch Thompson embracing return to Starkville

Auburn coach Butch Thompson go in-depth about his trip back to Starkville this weekend for an SEC weekend series.
Matthew Stevens

Mississippi State head coach John Cohen and pitching coach Butch Thompson talking at Dudy Noble Field in 2015.(Photo: Bill Simmonds/Mississippi State athletics department)

AUBURN – It’s a 248-minute drive from Starkville, Mississippi to the athletics facility building at Auburn University.

And in each of those 248 minutes on the afternoon of Oct. 22, 2015, Butch Thompson says he had approximately 248 conflicting emotions as he drove for his introductory head coach press conference at Auburn. When he headed east early on that morning on Interstate Highway 82 toward Birmingham, Thompson couldn’t help but think one more time about the seven and a half years of experiences he was leaving in his rear view mirror.

“(Former Mississippi State head coach) John Cohen let me speak to the team and I got to tell them personally and I thought about being able to hug every one of those boys that morning,” Thompson said. “I needed to do that.”

About the time he reached the Alabama border on his drive, Thompson then began to think about the future – his future as a head coach – a future Thompson admits to talking about with his wife Robin about the possibility of it never happening.

“I was nervous, anxious on the drive and honestly as I got on the highway I thought about the future and you could just start to see this 20-plus year journey had ended up at this point – something you had always hoped for,” Thompson said. “I started thinking about others helping me get to this dream of being a head coach in the Southeastern Conference.”

“I’ll probably step back for a second and say to myself, ‘how cool is this?”

— Auburn coach Butch Thompson about being back at Dudy Noble Field against Mississippi State this weekend.

Thompson will make that same 248-minute trip again this weekend when the No. 7 Auburn Tigers (30-13, 12-6 in SEC) face No. 10 Mississippi State (29-14, 13-5 in SEC), the current Southeastern Conference leader, at Dudy Noble Field – the place Thompson and Cohen transformed a college baseball powerhouse into a College World Series participant.

Before the national anthem for the Friday night weekend series opener, Thompson will dress in the visitors’ clubhouse, he’ll manage in the first base dugout and it’ll only be the second time he’s been back on the MSU campus since accepting his first head coaching opportunity at a rival Power 5 Conference school.

“Coach-speak says this is a business trip and I’ll go back in the summer and see everybody I care about and love who are there,” Thompson said. “The human side, if you disarm me, says that will be strange. It’s happened as an assistant at Auburn and as an assistant at Georgia. But all those times were before you spent seven and a half years at one place, Mississippi State. It always gets back to the relationships.”

To properly understand the magnitude of why the move from MSU to Auburn had so many emotions for Thompson, you’ll need to understand about a much longer drive he made in 2008 from High Point, N.C. to Starkville.

Less than a week after accepting the head coaching position at High Point University, Thompson got a call from new Mississippi State head coach John Cohen about being his pitching coach but it was anything but a normal phone call. Cohen had called Thompson’s mentor Brian Shoop, who still is the head baseball coach at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, about who Cohen should let lead the pitchers and be a recruiting guru in the area. Shoop gave him one name: Butch Thompson.

“I knew what I needed and that was a person who was an expert with arms and recruiting in the local area and Shoop said this is the guy you have to have,” Cohen said. “What was so important beyond all that was, I needed somebody with patience because I’m a guy that needs it to happen now. I’ll tell you this, Butch Thompson is so much better at taking a breath and counting to 10 before doing something than John Cohen.”

Auburn head coach Butch Thompson spent seven seasons as the pitching coach at Mississippi State under head coach John Cohen.(Photo: Mississippi State athletics)

Except there was a problem. Cohen had no way of calling Thompson because he didn’t have his personal cell number and Thompson had already turned in his Auburn phone before arriving at High Point. Through some intermediary contacts, Thompson finally got in touch with Cohen but not through a conventional phone. Enter the OnStar hands-fee, voice-activated calling system from Thompson’s truck.

“I’ve gone through a lot of things in this business but I can’t remember going over the beginning stages of an interview and then talking to them about building a program with a person through the OnStar system in their car,” Cohen said with a laugh.

Through conversations with Thompson via the OnStar system, Thompson knew he had a new job, he would need to develop a plan with Cohen and most importantly, he knew he had to find a way to tell the athletics administration at High Point they no longer had a head coach.

“I had to call OnStar first and request something like, 300 minutes and that’s when I thought if I’m going to be driving nine hours then I better be able to get something done,” Thompson said. “I talked to John and we wrote down numbers and I called all the players. Over nine hours, I called every player on two different rosters to tell them two different sets of news. It was really odd.”

Cohen and Thompson managed to battle early roster limitations, a complete recruiting overhaul and even part of a fan base that didn’t want either of those men in those positions to begin with because of the timeline of events in 2008 that led to Ron Polk being dismissed and Cohen being hired.

“It was difficult at first because I think I’m a pleaser by nature and it wasn’t happening,” Thompson said. “Over time I got to understand how and why he would do things and we started to be perfect for each other.”

By 2010, MSU had a remarkably connected trio of athletics director, head baseball coach and top baseball assistant all with an intellectual and emotional connection to the program but also to each other.

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This photo sits near the desk of Auburn head coach Butch Thompson. In the photo is then-Mississippi State head coach John Cohen (center) and Thompson (far right) outside of Wrigley Field.(Photo: Matthew Stevens/Advertiser)

When Scott Stricklin was promoted to athletics director at MSU in 2010, the school had hired a Mississippi native who was the MSU baseball sports information director as an undergraduate student from 1990-92. Stricklin watched Cohen as a player and the two had a deep connection that went beyond the baseball program to which Stricklin took Cohen on an interview with Rick Ray, who would be eventually hired as the men’s basketball coach. In their life away from the ballpark, Stricklin, Cohen and Thompson were all married and all had multiple daughters at home.

“I remember that before being a member of the department, before I got the AD job and I knew John as a student at MSU, he was so steadfast in his belief in Butch even with public fan outcry was suggesting he shouldn’t,” Stricklin said. “I then remember us going to Omaha and thinking that Butch is the same person I met when we weren’t winning those first two years. He was always honest and caring and I’ve just always liked him.”

After the 2012 season, Cohen would say publicly “Butch Thompson is ready to be a head coach tomorrow” and by making him associate head coach, did he best to prepare Thompson for such an opportunity.

Cohen had Thompson begin to speak at fundraisers, alumni functions and national coaching conventions without MSU’s pitching coach having any idea why he was being asked to do this.

“I would tell him I’m not good at this stuff and he would say I had to do it for the development of the program and the fans,” Thompson said. “What I didn’t realize until later was he was doing it for the development of me as a head coach. Now, I feel that need to do that with (Auburn assistants) Brad Bohannon and Greg Drye.”

Nearly nine years after Thompson, who was born in Amory, Miss., decided to join a rebuilding project at the place Cohen’s wife, Nelle, would call ‘The Carnegie Hall of College Baseball’, John Cohen won’t be in the opposing dugout this weekend. Cohen was named the athletics director at Mississippi State on Nov 4, 2016. Nick Mingione, who Thompson spent several years in the same office with across from Dudy Noble Field as a fellow assistant at MSU, is currently in his first season as the head coach at Kentucky.

While there are still players on the MSU roster Thompson recruited to the Bulldogs program, the Tigers second-year head coach will stress with anybody who asks that he absolutely realizes he’s certainly playing three games away from where he considers home.

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Auburn new baseball head coach Butch Thompson.
Matthew Stevens

For a person to leave one rival SEC school and go to another without resentment, anger or bad blood is somewhat remarkable but that’s the dynamic that led to Thompson finally getting the job at Auburn.

To the right of his desk inside the Auburn baseball office, there’s a framed picture of that personal connection with Mississippi State. Five people decked out in MSU maroon and white apparel outside Wrigley Field in Chicago. Included in the photo is MSU senior associate athletics director Bo Hemphill, Cohen and barely in the photo in the far right is Thompson. For three days this weekend, he’ll be known this weekend just as the guy in Auburn orange and blue standing in the visitors dugout.

“Beyond being locked in to the games, I think I’ll take away that Mississippi State was a big part of my life and Auburn is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Thompson said. “I’ll probably step back for a second and say to myself, ‘How cool is this?' "